Political Satire: Having trouble surviving these times? You’re not alone. Join us in columnist John F. Di Leo’s exploration of an alternate universe, where we imagine the impossible:
An idealistic teenager, living in the 51st ward of a fictional city in middle America, volunteers at the local party headquarters, and learns a lesson or two about modern urban politics.
Little Pavel Tries Falafel
By John F. Di Leo
When Pavel Syerov, Jr. (Paul to his friends) arrived at 51st Ward party headquarters after school one day, he saw an unexpected snack on the collating table in place of the usual bowls of pretzels and potato chips.
“What’s the snack, Pockets?” he asked the old deputy committeeman, typing away at his keyboard in the corner.
“Oh, that’s, uh, fried falafel balls. Chickpea mush. Or, bean mush. Something like that. Very popular in the middle east.” Pockets took a swig of beer. “Not bad with a good dip.”
Looking around, Pavel said “but I don’t see any dip.”
“Yeah,” said Pockets in reply. “I’ve got a bowl of honey wheat braid pretzels here by me. Have some.”
As Pavel helped himself to a pretzel braid, he asked “so why do we have falafel here, at headquarters, Pockets?”
“Oh, the Boss had a meeting with some guys from the mosque down the street today, Paully. Guess he wanted to be a good host. I woulda put out pretzels, but that’s fine… more for us!”
“What does the Boss have to discuss with guys from a mosque, Pockets? Who invited who?”
Pockets shrugged his shoulders. “They invited themselves, I guess… the Boss got a call the other day. They just asked for a meeting.”
“What about, Pockets? I thought religious institutions were forbidden from political activity.”
Pockets chuckled. “What do they teach in the schools nowadays… The Constitution forbids the federal government from mandating a specific religious denomination, that’s all. We have religious freedom, Paully. If a church wants to get involved, it can. There are some restrictions to maintain tax-exempt status, of course, but we only enforce those on Republicans. As long as a church supports our guys, they have pretty much free rein to do whatever they want.”
Pavel had never thought about it that way. He had seen news reports all his life about how the ACLU, atheist groups, and other similar anti-religious organizations are always hammering at villages, cities, and states to remove religious symbols and practices from their public buildings and public areas, so he always assumed that this applied to political activity too. But, he now realized, maybe not?
“Pockets, what sort of political activity can a church be involved in?”
Pockets took a long drink before answering. “Well, one of the most common is just inviting candidates to talk. Churches, temples, synagogues, mosques… these are great gathering places; best places you’ll ever see for a candidate, because they’ve got hundreds, or sometimes even thousands, of people together in one big hall, all facing the podium, all sitting nicely in pews, ready to listen to a sermon, a speech, a harangue. And these are trusting audiences, figuring that the speaker has the pastor’s blessing to be there, so he must be good. It’s the best endorsement you can score!”
“Does this happen often, Pockets? No candidate has ever come to speak at my church. I can’t imagine we’d ever allow it; it just feels like a mixture of things that shouldn’t mix, ya know?”
Pockets raised a pretzel as if a baton for gesturing, as he said “You’ve got three kinds of churches. The ones that ban politics totally, the ones that grudgingly let candidates onsite to pass out brochures at the parking lot, but still feel funny about anything else, and the ones that really welcome activism. You may go to a normal church where they don’t do any politics… but there are plenty that are totally the opposite.”
Pockets polished off his beer, to whet his whistle for a lecture. Pavel paid attention.
“Lotsa churches and such are activist. They invite candidates in to give speeches all through the election season. Your southern churches, especially – they like good, wild speeches from their pastors, so if a candidate can come in and deliver a barnburner, good for them. They love it! I think there’s a special talent for talking at a church… Bill Clinton was always a pro at it, he could manage that perfect evangelist pose, yelling about the fire and brimstone that’s gonna rain down on us if the GOP wins an election, how God wants us to care about the poor and sick, so we need to elect a government that provides housing and healthcare and jobs… ya know. The whole party agenda, wrapped up in a cassock and delivered at the altar.”
Pavel didn’t quite see how our religious and charitable duties could be met by a government confiscating one person’s money through taxation and putting it through the filter of government bureaucracy to write a welfare check to someone else, but he held his tongue.
“Of course, sometimes the speaker goes too far,” said Pockets. “Didja hear how State Senator Rickey Hendon introduced Governor Quinn at a Chicago church? How important it is that he get elected to his full term rather than the Republican, Senator Bill Brady, who’s sexist, racist, homophophic, and everything else he could think of before he ran out of breath?”
No, Pavel hadn’t heard about that one.
“Oh, yeah, the media normally don’t cover the embarrassments on our side, Paully, lucky for us… Hendon really stuck his foot in his mouth with that one. There were reporters there; the microphones were on… but again, lucky for us… most Illinois media didn’t use it. Woulda been good for their ratings, and for their respectability; they’ve been looking too partisan lately… losing viewers every day… but no problem. Given the choice between what’s good for their employer and what’s good for the Democratic Party, most of your modern reporters will choose what’s good for the Democratic Party every time!”
Pavel asked if Hendon had been called on the carpet for such slanders, when it got out.
“No, son, not really. I think Brady got Quinn to issue a sorta non-apology apology… something like ‘bare-knuckle politics are good for Illinois, sorry ya couldn’t take the heat’ or something like that. Our side doesn’t normally hafta apologize.”
“And yet,” chirped in Pavel, “when good liberal Democrat Juan Williams just mentioned that when seeing muslims board a plane, he sometimes gets a touch nervous for a minute, National Public Radio went and fired him.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” answered Pockets. “Ah, everybody figures they prob’ly fired him for working for Fox News on the side. They’d prob’ly been lookin’ for an excuse to fire him for years.”
Pockets asked for “Another grenade, Paully?” and continued as Pavel went to the refrigerator to get another longneck for the old man, and a diet cola for himself while he was at it. “Some churches’ll host a candidate every week, build it right into their Sunday service for a coupla months… one week the state rep candidate, next week the state senator, next week the Congressman… Takes a certain talent, as I say, but the ones who are good at it get invited back all the time, make the congregation feel like he’s really one of them.”
Knowing what Pavel knew about a lot of the candidates the Party chose to run for office, he wondered how they could set foot inside a church without lightning striking the place, but he just quietly delivered the beer to the old ward heeler and sat back down. “Here ya go, Pockets!”
“Thanks, Paully. So anyway… the speeches are good, and we get volunteers that way too… lotsa folks figure if their pastor endorses somebody, it must be okay to work for them. Makes sense. Works for both parties… Republicans can get volunteers from conservative churches, Democrats can get volunteers from liberal churches. It all works out.”
“So both parties do all the same things, then, Pockets?”
“Now, I didn’t say that, son!” Pockets munched his pretzel and explained. “There are also churches that go a little farther for our side than they do for theirs. There are churches that hold voter registration sessions, cosponsor get-out-the-vote drives… churches that fund our projects directly… help us out at the polls… yup, we benefit more than they do from it.”
“Look at Jeremiah Wright’s old church, Trinity United. Ya can’t tell me that a pastor who rails against his country day and night is really running a religious community, ya know? But it’s a political place, and he was a magnet for a certain type of activism. So his church grew and grew over the years. When Barry wanted to become a Chicago politician, that’s the church he joined.”
Pavel asked “I thought that was just the president’s denomination. No?”
Pockets laughed out loud, then composed himself. “The president’s denomination? Come on, Paully! His fathers were both muslim and his mom was an atheist. He didn’t have a denomination! For an up-and-coming politician of his stripe, this was the church to join for political advancement, that’s all. I’m no theologian, but I’m sure there wasn’t any denominational consideration in his choice of church.” Pockets took a swig and continued. “You remember all those things Wright got in trouble for a coupla years ago, all those things he said, and how Obama claimed to have never heard any of them, sitting in the congregation for twenty years? Nahh, if you care about the theology, you pay attention to the sermons. My bet is that Barry just sat there and daydreamed from beginning to end.”
Pavel had a feeling the president had paid attention all along, and just didn’t want to admit that he agreed with his pastor on all that, but again, he held his tongue.
“So how does all this affect our election operations, Pockets? Why do we have the leaders of a mosque visiting headquarters? Surely if they just want to invite a candidate to speak, they’d just call the candidate and invite him, right?”
Pockets took out an article he’d printed from the internet a couple weeks before, and had forgotten to give Pavel until now.
“Check this out, Paully. In Kansas City, they had a primary a coupla months ago, and this bus shows up at a polling place fulla Somali immigrants from some mosque. Only one guy, the boss, spoke English, so he helped them all register and vote. They were immigrants, so they hadn’t known about the registration rules… and they couldn’t read the ballots so they needed help… so their boss took ‘em all in and voted for ‘em. Whole busload.”
“Wow, Pockets… were they all citizens?”
“Whatta you think, Paully?”
“Wow. So let me count this off… you’re talking about unregistered voters showing up, probably non-citizens too, being forced to vote a certain way by their boss, the ‘interpreter’… that’s amazing.”
“We’re not done yet, Paully. Think about it. Remember the New Orleans method?”
Pavel slapped himself in the forehead as he remembered. “Multiple precincts! They probably did this more than once that day, huh? Probably went from precinct to precinct with the same illegals, and kept voting until they ran out of time!”
“…or until they ran out of polling places, eh Paully?!” finished Pockets, as he raised a pretzel in a triumphal toast.
“Do we expect them to do more of the same in future elections, Pockets?”
“Whadda you think, Paully? If at first you don’t get caught, fraud, fraud, again!” Pockets took a healthy swig of his beer and added “Seriously, though, Paully, this is something of a new development. Time was, you hadda be in the country for a long time before you could get your citizenship… seven years or more, usually. So voters were expected to be able to at least read English well enough to figure out the ballot without help in the old days. Not any more. Now, so many people can get their citizenship fast, or they just never bother to learn English because we make it so easy for immigrants, especially Spanish-speakers, that a person can walk in the polling place unable to speak English, and nobody thinks nothin’ of it, ya know?”
“So, what you’re saying is… our widespread open-borders, open-door immigration policy over recent years has made all kinds of vote fraud easy. Election judges don’t expect everybody to speak English anyway, so when some don’t, it doesn’t raise eyebrows anymore. And if things don’t raise eyebrows, they… um, we… get away with it, completely unchallenged.”
“Yup, Paully, just when it looked like the Democratic Party was dead, along came unrestricted immigration and a Tower of Babel of languages in recent years, to keep us alive, no matter what! Isn’t it great?”
Pavel didn’t answer… he just noticed that Pockets’ beer was empty, so he got up to get him another.
Pockets kept talking. “Yeah, mosques and churches have been good to us, Paully. Specially the churches. They host voter registration drives, they provide volunteer service points to their kids, they fill the crowds at rallies at state capitols….. churches donate like crazy to groups like ACORN and the illegal immigrants’ ‘rights’ groups, usually through their charitable agencies. Look at the Roman Catholic Church, for example. Some parish priests would happily support us; others never would. But they all hafta pass the hat for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and that bunch gives indirectly to lots of our friendly groups! So every Catholic who donates to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, for example, donates to the Democratic Party, through a coupla filters. Smart, huh?”
“And this never puts these churches’ tax-exempt status in jeopardy, Pockets?” Pavel asked as he handed the old man his beer.
“Nah, Paully,” he chuckled as he opened up his longneck and took a swig. “Like I told ya, we only prosecute churches and temples if they get too active for the Republicans. As long as they’re working for us, they can keep it up as long as they wanna!”
Pockets picked up another pretzel, and checked the clock on the wall. “I wonder when the Boss is coming back. I’m curious about those guys from the mosque. Hope they’re gonna take care of us like they did in Kansas City. We sure need the votes, this time.”
Copyright 2010-2024 John F. Di Leo
This is a work of fiction, and any similarity with any person, living or dead, is unintentional. The Tales of Little Pavel were originally published in serial form in Illinois Review, from 2010 through 2016, and the full collection of stories about Little Pavel and the denizens of the 51st Ward is available in paperback or eBook, exclusively from Amazon. Republished with permission.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available only on Amazon, in either paperback or eBook. His latest book, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume Three,” was just published in November, 2023.
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